


until land reappears

by artificialpeach



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: F/F, Lesbian AU, Summer road trip, They're married!, road trip au, they're both teachers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25881640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artificialpeach/pseuds/artificialpeach
Summary: it's on trixie's bucket list to go on a roadtrip with her wife. when she unexpectedly inherits enough money for it, that's exactly what she does
Relationships: Trixie Mattel/Katya Zamolodchikova
Comments: 14
Kudos: 52





	1. away and see for yourself

**Author's Note:**

> hello! it's almost the end of summer, so i've decided that it's time for some summer travel soft wife content. i hope u enjoy!

nothing’s the same as anything else. away and see

for yourself. walk. fly. take a boat till land reappears,

altered forever, ringing its bells, alive.

 **carol ann duffy, _away and see_** ****

***

The road trip had always been Trixie’s idea. At her third job and Katya’s second, at the little campus library where they met in sophomore year of college, it was the one thing besides country music and beekeeping that she would always, somehow, bring any conversation back to. On their third date, Trixie drove Katya all the way up to the October-orange woods an hour north of the NYU campus, hiked her to the top of a hill with a thermos of coffee in her backpack, and told her about her grandfather’s road trips in the sixties and seventies; how he and her grandma lived in a little yellow Volkswagen campervan with daisies painted on the doors for a whole year before they settled down to have kids. Trixie had mentioned, with resolute stoicism, how she wanted to live on the road in a retro van with her guitar and her wife one day. Katya had agreed wholeheartedly, said that it was something she could see her doing, before kissing her senselessly right at the top of the mountain.

A small part of her knew that she’d likely never have the money for it after graduation. Sure enough, senior year came and went perfectly on schedule, she moved the tassel on her cap from right to left and watched Katya do the same before tossing them both skywards, unable to distinguish the two once they came tumbling back down to earth. For the next five years, they had both been unfairly, irrefutably broke.

The death of her grandpa hadn’t come as a surprise; he was eighty-seven, weary, seemingly growing smaller with every visit, as though one day he would simply vanish altogether. What did come as a surprise, however, was that he had been much richer in his life than he had let her, or her mother, believe. Trixie knew he had been a successful man; yet she’d been caught rather by surprise by the letter in her name that arrived in the mail, informing her that she would inherit one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the months following his death.

Trixie had paid off all her student debt, and Katya’s too, with a comfortable sum set aside for a retirement fund, should they live long enough to need it. Still, even after being sensible with it all, she found herself with more money than she necessarily knew what to do with.

The road trip had always been Trixie’s idea; but only ever in the abstract, something that she thought she knew wasn’t _really_ going to happen.

“We should do it.” Katya’s chair squeaks as she shuffles in her seat. They’re sitting at the little square table in the kitchen. Trixie traces the black whorls and rings in the wood of the tabletop, digs the nail of her index finger into a divot right in the middle. As Katya speaks, Trixie looks up at her, through the thin, white steam pluming upwards from the two mugs of tea sitting in front of each of them.

“Huh?”

“The van you’ve always talked about. We should buy one. Renovate it, go out on the road for the summer.”

Trixie wraps her hands around her mug, and the metal of her wedding ring tinkers against the ceramic. “For how long?”

Katya looks down at Trixie’s hand, where she’s tapping her ring again and again, and reaches out to stop her, holding her palm flat against the warm side of the mug with her own hand. “I don’t know. A few weeks, a month – the whole season, if you want. It’s up to you.”

“What about work? And the house?”

Katya leans forward, ducks her chin slightly to feel the warmth of the steam on her face, her cold nose. “We can plan our lessons on the go if we bring Wi-Fi with us. I’ll build us a tiny little desk and everything. We don’t have to actually _be in_ our classrooms over the summer, right?”

Katya sips at her drink, waiting for Trixie to nod before she continues. “And the house will be fine without us. We can give Adore the spare key and get her to water the garden and our houseplants. Fuck, she could even stay here if she really wants to, I know she hates her roommates.” She takes another sip, longer this time, and the gulping sound of her swallowing is uncomfortably loud in the quiet of the room. “Just a thought.”

Trixie looks down again, pondering. As she drinks her tea, she sees herself - the tip of her nose, the oily shine of her forehead - in the reflection of the maple-dark, translucent liquid; wobbly, uncertain of itself, but then more settled, clarified.

It feels, very suddenly, that her brain has climbed out of its dormant little cave inside her head and is shaking her by the shoulders. She shifts in her seat to make room for where it now sits - a lovely, lively presence right in her lap.

“Okay. Yeah,” Trixie nods, sips at her tea, looks up at Katya. Her mug is still held up under her nose, and she lowers it slowly to let Katya see her face as it unravels itself into a smile until she’s laughing, and Katya’s laughing, and then they’re both laughing together, letting it bounce around their little kitchen, letting their neighbours know that they’re happy, or at least that they know they’re going to be. “Why not?”

Three weeks later, Trixie is sitting on the floor of the van; _their_ van. It’s a hollow shell of the worn-out, boring chunk of metal and wood that it had been when they’d bought it. All of the old cabinets and surfaces had been torn out as soon as Trixie had gotten the chance; she couldn’t bear to look at such a mediocre interior. Only the two captains’ chairs in the cab are left over; otherwise, it’s completely empty. Katya delights in knocking on the bare, metal walls from outside to hear the hollow clunk of it echo into absolutely nothing.

Trixie rolls out a silver sheet of insulation across the floor, shuffling backwards as she goes, wincing at the unforgiving ache of solid metal on her knees with nothing but the thin material of her jeans in between. She drills the sheet into the ground along the edges, delighting in the burning muscles of her right arm as she repeatedly brings the tool up and down again. She feels butch, and strong, and laughs to herself at the idea of it; she might be strong, but she certainly isn’t butch. The van rocks from side to side as she shifts her weight, and she only notices it once she sits still because the car keeps swaying around her.

Katya steps inside, hunched over so she doesn’t hit her head on the roof, with a rectangular sheet of the same, reflective insulation in her hands. There’s a smaller rectangle with rounded corners cut out in the middle to accommodate for the window. As soon as Trixie is finished on the floor, she shifts up into a squat to drill the new sheet into the wall whilst Katya holds it up for her.

“Okay, only one more of these, and then we can start putting the wood panels over the top.” Trixie shuffles over to the door until she can swing her legs outside and sit properly. She leans forward, stretches her arms up and outwards with her breath held tightly in her chest until she feels her spine and shoulders pop, then exhales all at once in a huge, airy groan.

Katya nudges Trixie’s outer thigh with the toe of her boot until she shuffles over. When Katya sits down, they’re hip-to-hip, pressed together at the sides. It’s almost uncomfortable, with their pelvic bones poking against each other like this. Katya turns to kiss Trixie on the cheek before resting her head against Trixie’s shoulder. It’s just at the perfect height so she doesn’t have to crane her neck uncomfortably to reach her. It’s as though Trixie was built to fit against her own body, two jigsaw pieces that align better with no other.

“This is going to be difficult, isn’t it,” Trixie says, kissing the top of Katya’s head. It’s not a question, not really, but Katya hums in agreement anyways. Katya finds Trixie’s hand in her lap, holds it there, feels the warmth radiating from the tops of her thighs.

“A good kind of difficult, though,” Katya says. Trixie knows this already. It’s the kind of hard work she enjoys; physical labour with a reward. She kneads at her kneecaps with the pads of her fingers, anticipating bruises there by tomorrow.

“ _Yeah.”_ Trixie smiles, rubs at her eyes with the knuckles of her free hand. Katya’s palm is sweaty against hers, and it makes her aware of the dampness under her own arms and on the back of her neck. There’s a scrunchie on Katya’s wrist, and Trixie tugs her hand free to slide it off, pulling her hair back into a bun with it. Katya’s hair isn’t long enough to tie back, hasn’t been for years since she cut it all off into a chin-length bob on a whim the week before they got married; it’s clearly one of Trixie’s things, dark pink and velvety. But the fabric of the scrunchie makes Trixie’s wrists itch, and since they’re never more than a few rooms apart, Katya keeps it on for her. Once, Trixie made her most reliable student read a chapter of _The Catcher in the Rye_ to the rest of the class, for the express purpose of running across to the art department to find Katya and tie her hair back, because it was making her hot, and she is always unapologetically seeking out any excuse to see her wife.

“Do you want coffee? Tea?” Katya runs her finger back and forth across the tip of Trixie’s pinky nail. It’s cut short, and her peach-pink nail polish is chipped at the corners.

“Mmm. I want something cold.”

“Iced coffee, then? I can drive us to Dunkin’, my treat.”

Trixie scoffs. “A drive-thru coffee date? I might like that if I was, I don’t know, a decade younger.”

Katya raises her eyebrows, pulls on Trixie’s finger repeatedly as though she’s honking a horn, and Trixie squeaks.

“Okay, fuck! I’m gay, of course I want iced coffee.” That makes Katya laugh, her mouth pulled wide open and making her eyes squint so much that they might be closed. Trixie kisses at the faint crows’ feet beside Katya’s eye before standing, pulling Katya up with her by their joined hands.

“Come on, you dyke. Get some caffeine into us both, and we might finish the panelling in time for dinner.”

They have the van finished by the beginning of May, right down to the little leather clasps to hold the cupboard doors shut whilst they’re moving. Katya had crocheted two yellow blankets to cover the cold leather of the driver and passenger seats, whilst Trixie sewed little felt buffers to sit between their bowls and plates to stop them from clanging against each other on the road. They had paid a little extra, at Trixie’s insistence, to repair the old, rusted extendable roof that it came with, so now they can both stand completely upright whenever they park anywhere. She even made sure to build a little nook beside the bed for Katya’s canvases and her own books, and the purple succulent plant that they’ve both had since graduation. Katya had re-painted the old, beige exterior a gentle baby blue, with a string of white and yellow daisies wrapping all the way around the middle as an homage to Trixie’s grandfather. Right beneath the side door handle reads both of their names; Katya’s in her own loopy, slanted handwriting, and Trixie’s upright and spread more widely, with tiny stars dotting each _i._

“Okay,” Trixie begins, placing the spare front door key into Adore’s outstretched palm. “The garden needs to be watered twice a day – first thing in the morning and then again at dusk – unless it rains, then you can just sort of play it by eye.”

Adore nods along, but she’s otherwise preoccupied with twisting the house key onto her own ring of keys, before clipping it with a silver carabiner to the front belt loop of her black shorts, ripped and ragged at the hem.

It’s May 31st, a Sunday. School was out for the summer on Friday, and Trixie and Katya had the van packed and organised by the end of Saturday. It’s parked in the driveway, with their normal, everyday car tucked safely away in the garage. The headlights keep turning on, getting brighter, and then going out again as Katya fiddles with the controls from inside to memorise them all; everything is just slightly different than in their other car. It’s a European build, manual rather than their usual automatic. Both Trixie and Katya had learned to drive stick shift in high school, but it’s been more than ten years since that happened, so it’s taken some adjusting to.

“We have houseplants in every room except for the basement, obviously. I’ve stuck little post-its on the plant pots, so you know how much to water each of them.”

Trixie and Adore are standing on the front porch, and Katya bounds up the steps to join them from the van. She moves so quickly that she makes it all the way around to the opposite side of the car before the driver’s-side door slams completely closed. The noise comes just long enough after Trixie had anticipated it would that it makes her jump a little.

Katya comes over to wrap her arms around Trixie’s waist from behind, reaching up on her tiptoes so that she can rest her chin on Trixie’s shoulder and look at Adore properly. Trixie tells her everything about the house – where to find whatever she might need, which drawers in which rooms she’d prefer she didn’t look inside, and which days the garbage men come, just in case she stays long enough to amount that much trash.

“Awesome,” Adore says, leaning back against the railing of the porch with one foot crossed over the other. “Is Courtney allowed to stay over a few nights with me?”

“As long as you don’t fuck in our bed, sure. That’s VIP only, I’m afraid,” Katya jokes, pretending to squeeze Trixie’s boobs by honking her hands in the air in front of them. Trixie snickers and slaps at Katya’s wrist, but still grabs both of Katya’s hands to wrap them tightly around her middle again, her forearms crossed right underneath her bust.

Adore laughs, blushing just enough for Trixie to be able to see it, but she doesn’t say anything. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Please don’t break anything,” Trixie pleads.

“I won’t if you don’t.” Adore nods towards the van, and they all smile. “Have fun, you guys! I’ll miss you.”

She pulls the two of them into a hug, and Katya shimmies her way around Trixie to stand right in the middle, with one arm around Adore’s neck and the other around Trixie’s. Adore turns towards the front door of the house, testing her key in the lock. It’s even smoother than the key to her own apartment. She leans against the doorway to watch Katya leap down all of the porch steps at once, with Trixie walking close behind her, waving to them both as they climb into the cab.

When Trixie gets into the driver’s seat she has to fix all of the mirrors, and pulls at the bar by her ankles to make the seat roll back; Katya has it so far forward that it makes Trixie’s knees get lodged in the bottom of the steering wheel. As she adjusts the rear-view mirror, the little decoration hanging from it sways to and fro. It’s a little polymer clay disc, something that Katya had made her as a gift for no particular occasion. On one side is a small, yellow sun, its rays streaked with red, and a tiny face in the middle with a smiling red mouth to match. On the flip side is the silver face of the moon, plump and freckled and rosy cheeked with its eyes closed, and long eyelashes swooping gently downwards.

Meanwhile, Katya unfolds a map in her lap, both legs crossed up onto the seat, her Birkenstocks discarded on the floor. There are arrows and circles all over the place, pointing up to Maine, and all the way across to the Pacific Northwest, with some going southwest and some southeast. They all eventually lead back to New York state. If they can stay out here in the van for the whole three months of summer, they’ll tour as many states as physically possible. Trixie knows she might miss their bathroom and TV and her big, generous wardrobe. Katya is less concerned about amenities and creature comforts than Trixie, but still worries that so much time away from home will free her soul from too many of its shackles, that she won’t be able to reach it to fit it back into her ribcage; that she won’t be able to adjust once they’re home again.

It can wait, she decides, as she follows with her finger a line of ink on the map, leading out from New York and through New England, until it reaches the very north-eastern edge of Maine, the furthest they can go without driving into the ocean.

Katya insisted that they visit as many National Parks as they can – the really good ones, like Acadia and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.

“You ready?” Katya looks up from the map at the sound of Trixie’s voice. Trixie is looking fondly over at her, a lovely smile playing at her lips. She looks so patient, and so, so kind. Katya knows that Trixie _isn’t_ often kind, not just for the sake of it in the way that she herself insists on; but she is so, unrelentingly kind to Katya that it makes her weak, even after so many years.

Trixie reaches out to squeeze Katya’s hand where it rests on top of the map. It makes the paper rustle slightly. She feels something hard and slender underneath it, and she raps at it with the pads of her fingers through the paper, trying to figure out what it is; it feels nothing like Katya’s foot, as bony and jagged as she might be in places. Katya pulls her phone out from underneath the map, where she had been slyly holding it with her other hand. Google maps is open on the screen, and it makes Trixie screech.

“You cheater!” Trixie grabs at Katya’s shoulder with both hands and sways her from side to side, with all of her endearingly crooked teeth on display as she grins.

“Shut up!” Katya whines, hiding her face behind her phone. “I’m sorry, you know I can’t read actual maps for _shit,_ babe.”

“You’re such a dumbass. God, I love you _so_ much.”

Trixie leans across to kiss Katya on the lips, forcefully at first, but then more gently, kissing her tenderly once she remembers there’s no rush. “Ready?” She asks again, receiving a firm, affirmative nod this time, and she takes it as her cue to turn the ignition.

As she reverses out of the drive, she slings one arm around the back of Katya’s seat, looking behind them both out of the back window. Katya kisses the inside of Trixie’s arm as she does, but Trixie doesn’t take her eyes off the road, simply smirking softly to herself. Once they’re out of the neighbourhood, Katya begins the route on the map on her phone, but with the directions muted so that she can give them to Trixie herself once they crop up.

“Okay,” Trixie sighs, smiling, “show me the way, baby.”

Katya does.


	2. the things that words give name to

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They step out of the van, Katya cradling her mug right up against her face with both hands as she waits for Trixie to lock the van behind her, until she can reach out a hand towards her wife. Their joint hands sway gently between them as they walk away from the tiny campsite and down a small path into the woods, trying not to spill their coffee as they amble over raised roots and uneven dirt trails.

away and see the things that words give name to

…

spell them with love.

**carol ann duffy, _away and see_**

****

*******

Trixie is still half asleep in the comfortable darkness of the van, with Katya curled up like a kitten against her back, when she hears the clattering sound of something small falling behind her head, and daylight suddenly slices through the room. It startles her awake, frowning at such an abrupt entrance to the day. She sits up slowly and twists around towards the source of the noise, squinting her eyes against the light.

The curtain has fallen down. She had sewn them all herself, made to measure for every single one of the windows in the van with little magnets inside, whose other halves had been glued meticulously around the edges of the windows, ready for the curtains to be snapped in place in a pinch.

It’s not broken, thankfully - the magnets had simply slipped away from one another in the night – and so she hangs the curtain back up, shrouding the room in darkness once more. She can’t really see anything now, her eyes having briefly forgotten how to navigate such low light.

With Trixie sitting upright, Katya begins to stir, missing the warmth and closeness of Trixie’s body even in her sleep. Trixie fumbles her hand around the tiny wooden cubby hole beside the bed for her phone, groaning quietly when she sees the time; it’s not even 6am yet, and she knows that she won’t get back to sleep now that she’s seen daylight, the golden morning having imprinted right onto the backs of her eyes.

“What time is it?” Katya mumbles, half of her vowels lodged in her morning-dry throat.

“Five-fifty.”

Katya groans too, kneading at her eyes with her knuckles. She reaches up blindly for Trixie, her hand landing flat on her chest, right above her heart. As she opens her eyes again, she smooths it up and around to the back of Trixie’s neck, bringing her down for a chaste kiss.

“Good morning,” Katya says, brushing the tip of Trixie’s nose with the pad of her thumb.

“Is it?” Trixie lays flat on her stomach, pressing her face into her pillow to muffle a yawn.

Katya chuckles, all rugged and crackly in her chest, and she coughs to let her voice catch up with the rest of her as she begins to wake up properly. She hooks a leg over Trixie’s hips and sits there for a brief second, right on her ass cheeks, leaning down to kiss the back of her neck once, before climbing the rest of the way over her body to stand up from the bed. Immediately, she is in the kitchen – the van is never much else besides a kitchen, except at night when it sprouts a bed from somewhere within the table and bench chairs – and begins to fill the kettle at the sink. It’s a delightful pastel yellow and whistles when it boils; Trixie had found it at a flea market, the little dent in its side bumping the price all the way down to four dollars. When Katya puts it on the stovetop, she turns it so that the dent faces the wall, and it’s forgotten about as soon as it leaves her line of sight.

Trixie tries to visualise the ticking of the stovetop ignition zapping the bottoms of her feet as she stretches, and uses it to propel herself out of the bed. Her feet touch the floor in tandem with the gas catching the spark and roaring into a ring of little blue flames.

“Tea or coffee?”

Trixie stretches her arms straight upwards, standing on her tiptoes, trying to reach the ceiling of the extendable roof. When her fingertips brush it, she lets out a tremendous breath. “Coffee, please.” As she lowers her arms again, she smooths a hand down the top of Katya’s arm, fixing the rumpled sleeve of her t-shirt.

Trixie shivers a little where she stands, only in the tank top and panties that she slept in. Her black yoga pants hang over the back of the driver’s seat and she slips them on, hopping on one leg before Katya panics at the sensation of the van rocking from side-to-side with it, and she holds onto Trixie’s elbow as she puts the other leg in and pulls them up.

There are two pairs of shoes by the sliding side door: Katya’s brown Birkenstocks, and Trixie’s bright pink crocs. Katya absolutely despises them; entirely refuses to look as Trixie slides her feet into them, focusing instead more intently than necessary on scooping a level spoon of instant coffee from the jar. Trixie knows this, and strokes down the length of Katya’s bare leg with the toe of her shoe, eliciting a theatrical gag out of her. Trixie giggles, pulling her white fleece over her head before stepping out of the van, sliding the door closed behind her with a hollow clunk.

Very quickly, she had fallen in love with the sensation of the crisp, early morning air on her face, making her cheeks ruddy, waking her up swiftly. The scent of the ocean, or a farm - or in this morning’s case, the pine forest - welcomes her into the day gently, serenely. When she gets back into the van, the smell of coffee will welcome her again, and then, too, will the familiarity of Katya’s scent, human and homely, like one warm embrace after another.

As Trixie walks towards the little block of toilets in the middle of the campsite, she can see the sunrise between the tops of the trees, a hazy bowl of peaches and cream. She wants to scoop it all onto a dessert spoon. She’s transfixed, finding herself overwhelmed with reverence for the sun and the sky, until she trips on a wonky tile at the threshold of the toilet block and it brings her mind stumbling back into her body, back down to earth.

There’s nobody else here, so Trixie uses the bathroom comfortably and in no hurry. The water is icy cold as she washes her hands, and there are no paper towels left to dry them with. She holds her forearms out in front of her like a T-Rex, her sleeves bunched up into her elbows, as she walks back out to the van. As soon as the outside air hits her wet hands, she shivers, putting a skip into her step, eager to get back inside and dry them properly on a towel as quickly as she can without actually running.

She’s cushioned by a swathe of warm air as soon as she steps back into the van. All of the doors and windows remain closed in the mornings when they boil the kettle, and it heats the place comfortably and quickly. Trixie is grateful for how smoothly this had become part of their morning routine; is impressed that they even _have_ a morning routine with a life like this.

Light comes pouring into the room as Katya makes her way around the perimeter, peeling each of the curtains away from the windows. As Trixie dries her hands, she ducks her head to look up at the sky again through the windows.

“The sunrise is beautiful,” she says, hovering her hands above the stovetop to warm them.

Katya props her hip against the edge of the table – she had already swiftly converted the bed back into its daytime disguise – peering to look out of the same window. She glances briefly at first, but then does a double take that makes Trixie smile, wholly transfixed, leaning her entire body towards the window so closely that her breath begins to fog it up.

“ _Oh.”_ Katya uses the sleeve of her hoodie to wipe the window clean again. “Can we go for a walk?”

The kettle begins to whistle before Trixie can respond, and she turns the gas off, pouring steaming water into each of their mugs. “I’d love that.”

They step out of the van, Katya cradling her mug right up against her face with both hands as she waits for Trixie to lock the van behind her, until she can reach out a hand towards her wife. Their joint hands sway gently between them as they walk away from the tiny campsite and down a small path into the woods, trying not to spill their coffee as they amble over raised roots and uneven dirt trails.

Maine is as beautiful as it had promised it would be, perhaps even more so. The trees look greener than they did in pictures online; the mountains more concrete and bold, the lakes more vast and twinkling and plentiful.

The short trail leads them downhill, each of them kicking dust up into their shoes as they walk, until the mouth of the forest opens into a clearing by the waterside. As the cool morning sun dapples across the surface of the water, the spaces between the trees lining the lakeside gleam like shattered diamonds. Its so brilliantly bright to look at that it’s almost painful.

There’s a patch of grass in front of the water - buffering the transition of the ground’s surface from dry, gravelly mud into the sandy lakebed - and Katya sits there. She holds Trixie’s mug for her as she lowers down beside her, and they both sit in a contented silence, watching the geese swim across the lake with their scattered children in tow. They even watch a turkey and a small porcupine emerge from within the woods, timidly exploring the morning before they retreat back into the cover of the forest.

Later, once they’ve filled their bellies with warm oatmeal and fruit, they’ll come back down to the lake with a towel under each of their arms and the most affordable eco-friendly soap they could find, and swim in the lake before anybody else wakes up and comes down here. They’ll wash each other’s bodies, and perhaps Trixie will wash Katya’s hair since it won’t take long to dry even in the cooler air, before drying and dressing in the woods, trying not to get sand and grass and tiny bits of tree bark in their clean clothes and between their toes. They’ll secure everything in the van and unplug the electricity from their pitch at the campsite and head out to wherever is next on their map – perhaps back through New Hampshire to Vermont, or maybe they’ll drive south through Boston.

For now, though, they have their coffee, and the geese on the water, and the whole morning unfolding itself languidly before them.

***

June rolls over into July on their second night in Washington state.

Katya realises that her eyes are open – the velvety darkness bearing an almost exact resemblance to the backs of her eyelids - when she emerges from a daydream, trying unsuccessfully to put herself to sleep. She’d napped for most of the drive earlier today; whenever Trixie would take over and let Katya ride shotgun, she would put on a podcast or one of her favourite albums, turned right down to a murmur, and let it wash over her as she slept.

Trixie snores very lightly, half of her face smushed into her pillow, with one leg swung over Katya’s lower half. She doesn’t stir as Katya slowly pulls herself free from underneath her, carefully climbing over Trixie to get out of the bed. The van rocks a little from side to side as she stands, but Trixie remains undisturbed.

Quietly, Katya pads over to the front of the van in her bare feet to sit in the passenger seat. She peels the curtain away from the front windshield and holds it all bunched up in her lap, fiddling with the magnets inside the fabric. Outside it is completely dark, except for a single, distant flickering light from across the cove – a lighthouse, Katya realises, after remembering she had seen it earlier in the daytime. Craning her neck to look up through the very top of the window, she looks for the stars, and is taken aback by just how many she can see, innumerable and wondrous formations of faint, twinkling light. There’s no light pollution this far out, and so she can even see the milky way, like a barely-there spattering of paint cutting right across the middle of the sky.

If they were at home, she would probably make herself a mug of tea, standing outside in the garden to let herself really experience the twilight. But the gas on the stovetop and the clunking of metal would undoubtedly wake Trixie - let alone the thunderous slamming of the doors, should she step out of the van.

Instead, she leans her whole upper body against the dashboard, her chin cupped in both hands, sitting and looking at the stars with a little bundle of awe nestled comfortably somewhere in her chest, until she starts to yawn again, and climbs quietly back into bed, over Trixie’s still-sleeping form.

The next morning, they drive five miles to the nearest gas station, and another twenty to get to Walmart to stock up on food. It rains the entire drive there, and they miss a turn that almost takes them the way back they had just come, because Katya gets distracted by the music she’s choosing and forgets to pay attention to her map. It’s relentless, and much more chaotic of a trip than Trixie tends to care for as a passenger, let alone whilst driving. Once they pull into the parking lot, however, Katya hops out of the van with her doc martens on and lands right into a puddle on both feet, and her childlike glee as she turns her face up towards the sky makes Trixie remember her place. She takes a moment to watch her wife, and the tenderness she had lost her grip on whilst behind the steering wheel comes drifting back, and she copies Katya in looking up to feel the rain on her face. The water is just as warm as the air, and even with only shorts and a t-shirt on, she isn’t cold. It’s all so suddenly serene that she feels slightly untethered, floating away, until she feels Katya’s hand in hers, wet and literal, and they run into the store together.

They fill the shopping cart with tinned food and bags of pasta and rice, and Katya does a loop of the produce stand in the middle of the room while Trixie examines loose onions to make sure they look healthy, placing them one by one into a paper bag. Katya picks up a punnet of strawberries and a bottle of orange juice that Trixie’s not sure will fit in their little box fridge, but lets her have them regardless; Katya will probably eat them all in one go on the road, anyway, even though it’s her turn to drive next. Trixie will pull off the stems for her and pop them in her mouth while Katya looks at the road, will unscrew the orange juice while Katya has her hands on the steering wheel.

Katya’s wearing her favourite pair of jean shorts, with the hems rolled right up to the tops of her thighs, her hairy legs completely on show, and keeps catching Trixie looking at her with a smirk. She’s got an old flannel shirt on, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and the whole getup looks so relentlessly gay. Every time they pass a reflective surface, she looks at herself and smiles, and shares a knowing glance with Trixie whenever someone looks at her a certain way – both the shared understandings with strangers, and the less comfortable feeling of being hate-crimed with just one glance.

They pay for their groceries, packing it into Katya’s rucksack and Trixie’s two cotton tote bags, and walk back to the van slowly, letting the rain wash over them again. As soon as the automatic exit doors slide open, a fork of purple lightning cuts through the sky right ahead of them, a few miles away. Before they even make it halfway back to the van, a peal of thunder rolls overhead, and Katya gasps, flailing her hands in front of her, spilling over with joy. The wind is blowing towards the mountains, so the storm will most likely disperse once it hits them, and she wants to make the most of it whilst it’s still here. She stops outside the van, waiting for Trixie to unlock it, but doesn’t follow her inside; instead, she looks over at the mountain range, waiting for the next burst of lightning and counting the seconds before the thunder follows suit. Once it arrives, Trixie pulls her back inside, a towel already in her hands outstretched towards Katya.

“You shouldn’t stand outside when there’s lightning, it’s dangerous.”

Katya rubs her hair dry, and then drapes the towel around her shoulders. “It’s so beautiful, though.”

Trixie huffs a laugh out of her nose, looking down at a bag of groceries as she unpacks it. “Not as beautiful as you.”

Katya rolls her eyes, but smiles - “Shut _up,_ oh my god” – as she takes a tin of kidney beans from Trixie’s hand, puts it in the little cupboard on her side of the kitchen, and plants a kiss on her cheek.

***

They make it all the way down to San Diego before having to head home for the start of the school year.

On August 2nd – their last night before turning around and heading back the way they came – Katya parallel parks the van into a little nook by the beach so that the side doors face out towards the sea.

There’s a small bag of firewood right at the back of their under-bed storage, and Katya crawls into the open cupboard on her stomach, handing things up to Trixie so she can shimmy her way through the narrow space and find it. They’d been saving it for a special occasion; maybe the fourth of July, or on their last night in the van before arriving back home, but tonight seems as good a night as any to use it.

The wood rattles in its sack as Katya bounds down towards the sand with it clutched in both hands, and Trixie follows in tow with a bag of marshmallows in one hand, a box of graham crackers in the other, and a big bar of Hershey’s chocolate sticking out of the back pocket of her shorts.

Everything from dinner had already been cleaned and put away, at Trixie’s request, before coming down to the beach, and so she pads slowly through the soft, dry sand in her bare feet feeling wholly at peace. The sunset is gently dazzling, slowly dipping down towards the sea in a smooth, pastel gradient. Katya has found a spot in front of the rocks and is perched low in a squat, emptying the bag by turning it upside down to let all of the chunks of wood come clattering down into a pile by her feet. They have more than they need, and so one of them – most likely Trixie – will have to put all of the pieces that they don’t use back into the bag at the end of the night, but she smiles and rolls her eyes at Katya, at how she’s fascinated by the sound of the planks knocking against each other as though she’s playing a game of Jenga.

Katya looks up at Trixie as she tosses her bags of food down onto the sand. “I thought you were bringing the blankets?”

“Oh,” Trixie says, looking back over her shoulder towards the van, as though it will somehow summon them from where they currently lay on the two front seats. “Sorry, I forgot.”

“It’s okay.” Katya puts her hands on her knees to push herself up to standing, “I’ll get them. You start building the fire.” She smiles at Trixie before setting off at a jog towards the van, but stops halfway once she realises that Trixie has the keys. “Oh! Trix -”

Before she can even finish her sentence, Trixie tosses the keys towards Katya, who catches them in mid-air. It’s a powerful throw, and she winces at the feeling of the keys cutting into the palm of her hand so forcefully.

Katya’s bare feet sink unevenly into the dry sand as she tries to run across it and it hurts the soles of her feet, makes her ankles ache, but she doesn’t stop until she reaches the edge. She climbs easily over the little rocky wall separating the shore from the roadside, wincing at the feeling of the stone floor colliding with the balls of her feet as she lands.

There’s another van parked a few metres away from theirs; it’s a different brand, bigger than theirs, and painted in a deep, forest green. As Katya comes back out of her own van with a pile of blankets clutched in both hands, a figure steps out of it, tying back their thick, red hair with a scrunchie. They look across at Katya at the sound of her slamming the door shut and locking it behind her, and smile. Even from this distance, Katya can see a little chip in their front tooth, how some of them are more crooked than others, and is hit with a pang of something comforting when she realises that it reminds her of Trixie.

“Oh, hello! I love your ride!” They say, taking a few steps closer to Katya, both hands sunken way past their wrists in the deep pockets of their overalls – they’re baggy, in a flowy brown linen, and look so unbelievably comfortable that Katya aches a little in her own denim dungarees.

“Thanks! I love yours too.” Katya chances a glance over the person’s shoulder to look through the open door of their van. There’s so many little knickknacks and hanging decorations that it looks unreasonable to drive with, but it’s so cozy, and seemingly lived-in and well loved. All of the surfaces are a much deeper, more rustic wood than in her van, and there’s even a rug on the ground.

“Thank you! It took a lotta years to get it just perfect, y’know? But it’s worth it to make it a home.”

Katya hoists her blankets over each of her shoulders, restless at the feeling of them slipping out of her grip no matter how much she adjusts them. “You live here?”

“Not in San Diego,” they say, chuckling, “But in the van, yes.”

Katya looks awed for a moment, her mouth loosely hanging open, until she smiles so big and so brightly, not even worried that she’s probably showing this poor stranger her molars. She walks forward, reaching out a hand towards them. “I’m Katya.”

They take Katya’s hand in both of theirs, shaking it once and squeezing gently. “Jinkx.”

Katya learns that Jinkx has been living in their van for almost two years as a musician, tutoring on the side to make ends meet, with their kitten for company. The last part comes as a surprise to Katya, with seemingly no cat in sight, until Jinkx pokes at the protruding pouch on the front of their overalls and it makes a squeaky little grumbling sound, and a tiny, fluffy head pops out of the top.

“This is Ivy,” they say, and Katya absolutely melts. “Are you travelling alone?”

Katya nods down towards the beach, where Trixie is still gathering stones in a circle in the sand to stack the firewood inside. “No, I’m here with my wife. We live in New York, this is our last night before heading back.”

“New York! You have come a long way, huh? In such a tiny little thing between the two of you, too. . .you must love each other very much.” Jinkx smiles, following Katya’s gaze over towards Trixie, and they both watch her intently focusing on stacking two very unfortunately shaped rocks on top of one another.

Katya has been smiling the whole time she’s been looking at Trixie, and is suddenly aware of it, letting it bloom. “We do.” She catches her mind floating away from the conversation slightly and reels it back home, a kite on a string. “We want to come back next summer. Not here, necessarily – just. . .anywhere. The road and the van makes us so happy. It makes _me so_ happy.”

“Do you think you’d ever do it full time? I know I’m biased, but I do strongly endorse it,” Jinkx says, grinning.

“I would. I’m not sure about Trixie, though – my wife. I think she misses home more than I do. Plus, we’re both teachers. It wouldn’t really make sense, not yet, at least.”

“Well, you have time to figure it all out, dear, don’t you worry about that.”

Katya gestures over towards the shore. “Do you wanna come join us on the beach? We’re doing s’mores and a campfire.”

Ivy has started climbing out of Jinkx’s overalls, now clumsily making her way up onto their shoulder, and they hold onto her with both hands. “That’s really sweet of you, but I have to feed my daughter. She didn’t finish her lunch earlier. Thank you, though!”

Katya wishes Jinkx a lovely evening with their cat before bounding back down to the beach. As soon as she reaches Trixie she stands behind her, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders and kissing the top of her head. Trixie immediately takes it off again to sit on it, already sweating.

“You were up there for forever,” Trixie whines, “I missed you.”

“I was talking with our neighbour, you koala bear.” Katya drapes the second blanket onto the sand before dropping to her knees beside Trixie, grabbing pieces of firewood but not really sure what to do with them.

Trixie takes the wood out of Katya’s hands and starts stacking them in a square on the sand like a log cabin. “Oh, what are they like?”

“Wonderful. I think I’ve found my new life coach?”

Trixie laughs. Once she’s finished stacking the wood, she sits back on her heels, looking around for the little box of matches. She even upturns the bag of marshmallows, hoping to find them underneath, but they aren’t here. She only looks up again, frowning, at a small, rattling sound, to see Katya holding them out in front of her. “Thank you,” she smiles.

The fire lasts the whole evening and into the night. Katya burns two of her marshmallows; Trixie only burns one, but she does catch the back of her hand with the hot end of her stick, and Katya babies her over it for a solid ten minutes.

After the last log burns down to charcoal, the whole firepit crackles and glows in orange embers. They sit for hours in the gloaming, drawing nearer to the warmth of the pit as the night air comes down to a chill. They both refuse to lie down because they don’t want to get sand in their hair, instead leaning against each other. The sneezing of the waves as they roll over the shore almost lull Katya to sleep twice as she rests her head against Trixie’s shoulder.

They only head back to the van once the tide comes in too close for comfort. Back inside, they sit bundled in their blankets with mugs of hot tea on the floor of the van, their legs dangling outside the open side-door, and watch in the darkness as the firepit slowly fills with water before vanishing completely. Trixie wonders if her ring of stones will still be there by morning; whether it’ll be the only trace of them ever having been here. If it is, she wants to make more. She wants tiny, harmless traces of the both of them in a thousand different places. She’ll tell Katya about it in the morning, she thinks, or maybe once they’re headed back towards the East Coast. They have so much time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello !! thank you so much for taking the time to read this - let me know what you thought! you can also find me on [tumblr!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/artificialpeachh)

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you thought! you can find me on [tumblr!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/artificialpeachh)


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